The Sanmen-1 AP1000 nuclear reactor project being built in the Zhejiang province of China has successfully completed first criticality, the latest milestone before commercial operation. This is a major leap forward for Westinghouse’s AP1000 nuclear power plant technology, which will be deployed at the Sanmen two units but also at the two Haiyang units (Shandong province, China) and at the Vogtle project (Waynesboro, Georgia, United States).
Being built by the Chinese state-run company China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) and Westinghouse, the project is expected to be commissioned later in 2018 and will become the first Westinghouse AP1000 to enter operation. A second reactor at the Sanmen site achieved hot testing phase in February 2018 and should be commissioned in late 2018 or early 2019.
In total, China plans to bring five nuclear reactors online by the end of 2018, boosting the nuclear installed capacity by 6 GWe: two AP1000s (Sanmen-1 and Haiyang-1), one EPR (Taishan-1), one VVER-1000 (Tianwan-3) and one ACPR1000 (Yangjiang-5). The country expects to reach the target of around 58 GWe of installed nuclear generating capacity by 2020 from the current 35 GWe and estimates that a further 30 GWe will be under construction by 2020.
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